Some charter schools hold public lotteries. Coney Island Prep held its first lottery in 2009.

Abigail Kramer is a public policy journalist at the Center for New York City Affairs and the parent of a 4-year-old in Brooklyn.

I’m running up two flights of concrete stairwell, on my way to torture myself.

I applied for a kindergarten spot for my son at Community Roots Charter, a small, progressive school in Fort Greene, and I really want to get in—as, I suspect, do the parents of the 457 other four-year-olds who applied, all vying for 50 spots, about 20 of which will go to siblings.

Like a lot of charter schools, Community Roots holds a public lottery, proving the transparency of its admissions by drawing names in front of a professional auditor and anyone else who cares to watch. I’m here, at least in part, to figure out who comes. The odds of getting in are abysmal, so why would any parent put themselves through this?

“We have a lot more people who leave disappointed than happy,” says Allison Keil, one of the co-directors.

And yet, about 25 grownups sit in the room, along with five or six kids, one of whom really, really doesn’t want to be here. At the front, the school’s office manager pulls tiny squares of paper from a spinning, plastic bucket. It’s like watching those Lotto clips on TV, where the balls bounce around in a box and the lady who pulls them out has a really nice manicure, except what’s at stake is your kid.

A round guy named Joe sits behind them in a pricy-looking suit and tie, one ankle propped on a knee. The auditor. Every few minutes he tells the name-reader to spin the bucket, reshuffling the fates of the kids who are left. The woman next to me is literally biting her nails.<!--more-->

Kindergarten fills up in about 15 minutes, and then the waitlist starts. I figure if my kid lands in the first 20 or so, then we might have a shot. He doesn’t. By the 50s, people are filtering out. Mom and dad of #89 give each other a sarcastic high-five. I’m glad someone still has a sense of humor.

Like so many things about raising a child in NYC, entering kindergarten is an intense encounter with scale and inequity. Some kids have guaranteed spots at schools with million-dollar PTAs. Some will be lucky to get an art class. If I weren’t a parent, my feelings on this would be clear: All the energy and angst that I’m spending in this room would be so much better spent on my neighborhood school, where any kid in a 12-block radius should have the right to the attention and quality that I’m trying to get from a charter. There’s nothing in my values or politics that makes it okay to prioritize one kid over another, except that I am a parent and I have no idea how to do right by my own child while also doing right. So here I am, staring at a projector screen and hoping that my kid will beat out somebody else’s.

We’re into the hundreds, and I know by now that we don’t stand a chance but suddenly it starts to mean something to me—that I’m here, that someone will care when my little kid’s unpronounceable name gets called. That to one person in this room, he’s not just another paper in a bottomless bucket. He’s my kid, who just wants to crash toy cars and be with me all the time. Whose circumstances I’ve done everything in my power to control since the day he was born.

Which, of course, is what all the parents in this room are doing here: Trying to find some sense of control as we send our kids into this gargantuan system that will define the next phase of their lives. I went on school tours and read about test scores and attendance rates and nodded or shook my head but, really, what do I know? My son is about to enter a world in which I will have very little access and even less power. A giant, haphazard machine that’s charged with educating 1.1 million kids every day—and which loses track of plenty of them along the way. Where he will be subject to all the vagaries and accidents and happenstance of the world—a bad teacher, an overcrowded classroom, this brutal anonymity that starts with 458 pieces of paper in a bucket

Number 107. I feel a small, piercing sense of gratitude that the bucket spinner said my son’s name correctly. It’s a stupid thing to care about but, two hours later, it’s why I’m here: Because I’m the person who cares more than anything in the world about what happens to waitlist kid # 107.